The lion crouched by the way of the Pilgrim in Christian Science is a false sense of sacrifice. Its roar is but a threat, and, like all error, it will cower and slink away under a brave eye, a determined purpose.
This false sense of sacrifice seems to embrace even man's preconceived idea of God, and it is frequently said that through the teachings of Christian Science man has lost his God, and sails the stormy sea of sense rudderless, and without his compass. What has he lost? Not God, but his false concept of God,—a God who knows both good and evil, and who, through the admission of life in matter, seems to have endowed man with the passions and appetites of sense, and spread before him a table of temptations which, unresisted, must end in man's destruction.
In this conception of God, man's salvation, at the best, rests upon the belief that the divine purpose can be swayed and swerved by human appeal. This is the God who has been sacrificed. What has been gained through Christian Science? A God who is too pure to behold iniquity. A God who destroys error, not by "everlasting punishment," but by the very indwelling of Good, into whose pure presence can enter no unclean thing.
